If play.com have got the details correct, then October is going to be a very expensive month (R1 “Lifeboat” is due on 18th, and the remastered R1 “Masterpiece” collection is out on the 4th).

Paolo emailed me to say that Sony are releasing “Suspicion” in Italy in September. Some of you may remember that MGM had announced several Hitchcock DVDs in 2004, but these were postponed indefinitely after Sony bought out MGM. Hopefully this means Sony are starting to think about releasing further Hitchcock titles?

It looks like Fox are finally going to release Lifeboat on DVD. The unconfirmed release date is October 18th.

I’ve also got hold of a pile of US budget releases from Westlake Entertainment Group. I’ve yet to add screen grabs to the site, but the transfers appear to be similar to the old Laserlight/Delta releases. I’m not sure if these count as some of the cheapest Hitchcock DVDs to date, but they only cost $0.89 (?0.50 GBP) each at DVD Pacific!

Friday started off with a session about the RFID implementation at Middlesex, with Alan Hopkinson, Tim Pond (D-Tech Direct), and Gregor Hotz (Bibliotheca). We’re planning to implement RFID at Huddersfield during 2006.

Next up, James Castle (Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer) and myself did a 45 minute session entitled “HIP Ideas”. James talked about the issues involved with setting up multi-language subject indexes. You can find my presentation (“Break Your HIP!”) here. Once again, many thanks to eagle-eyed Polly who spotted what had caused the “wheels to fall off” my live floor plan demo!

Finishing off the morning, Jill Osborne (Dynix) gave a series of HIP 4 demonstrations – here are my brief notes:

the built in spellchecker is able to offer a range of possible correct spellings (similar to Google’s “did you mean xxx?”)

the optional “Thesaurus Expanded Search” includes synonyms for each search term

printer friendly versions of search results and full bib pages are available

the ADA and Kids HIP profiles won’t be available until HIP 4.1

Finally, Jill ran through some of the things that won’t be carried across from a HIP 3 to HIP 4 upgrade:

XSL stylesheet changes

some look and feel options

any tabs or subtabs that are links

…like many at the conference, I can’t wait to get my hands on HIP 4!

Sadly, we had to rush off after Jill’s session to get back to the airport on time.

Many thanks to everyone involved with organising the conference – especially the Dynix staff!

Thursday started with a demo of Web Reporter from Phil Coles – here’s my notes from the session:

140 reports supplied as standard

reports processed on the Web Reporter server, using live data from the Horizon database (i.e. no data mining)

reports can be scheduled to run overnight

reports can be exported as PDF, Excel, CSV, etc

new reports can be created from scratch, or you can use one of the existing templates

current version of Web Reporter is not Unicode compliant, however the Horizon 8 version will

no knowledge of SQL required

handles non-January financial years

SQL can be imported from ReportSmith

This was followed by a presentation from Eric Keith (VP Operations, SirsiDynix US) about the company’s current and future developments – my notes from the session are available here.

Finishing off the morning sessions, Polly Dawes (Bradford), and Ian Haydock & Jan Broad (Staffordshire) ran a session about Telecirc – including a live demo via mobile phone! We’re hoping to finally get Telecirc running live at Huddersfield by the start of the new term.

Starting off the afternoon, Phil Coles gave a short presentation about HIP 4 and Horizon 8 before attempting a live demo – unfortunately technical gremlins caused one or two problems with the demo. Here’s my notes about HIP 4:

works with Java v1.4.2, although Dynix are currently testing it with more recent releases of Java

notes fields are all 1,500 characters (although Phil thought this can easily be increased if required)

EDI functionality built into Horizon (i.e. no need to use separate FTP software)

graphical serials prediction

This was followed by “Moving to MARC21”, with Ray Delahunty (Dynix UK), Polly Dawes (Bradford) and Ian Jennings (Huddersfield). It highlighted the two extremes of converting to MARC21 – Bradford had very few problems running the conversion under Dynix ILS, but the Huddersfield conversion (under Horizon) was a long and fairly painful process! Hopefully future conversions under Horizon will be much smoother.

The last session of the day was “My Favourite SQL” with Tim Fletcher (Birkbeck) and myself. I’ve uploaded my presentation (“Using SQL to Create Web Based Reports & Applications”) here. I’ll upload the advance notices Perl script as soon as I’ve finished debugging and documenting it.

Towards the end of the session, Anders FÃ¥k (LinkÃ¶ping University) gave a quick demonstration of their web based reports (which uses Microsoft .Net and Crystal Reports) – very impressive stuff!

In the morning, Jill Osborne from Dynix gave a very impressive demonstration of the new HIP 4 administrator interface.

One of the biggest problems I found with HIP 3 (and below) was doing the admin configuration – the options were here, there and everywhere. HIP 4 brings everything together into a single (fairly) intuitive interface. If this is a taster of things to come with Horizon 8.0, then the wait will be well worth it.